Hurd, Harvey B.

Born: 1828-02-14 Huntington, Connecticut

Died: 1906-01-20 Evanston, Illinois

Flourished: 1854 to 1865 Evanston, Illinois

Harvey B. Hurd, attorney, attended school and worked on his father’s farm until 1842, when he moved to Bridgeport, Connecticut, and apprenticed at the Bridgeport Standard, a Whig newspaper. Two years later, he moved to Peoria County, Illinois, where he attended Jubilee College for a year. Hurt then moved to Chicago, where he resumed newspaper work, first at the Evening Journal, and subsequently at the Prairie Farmer. Hurd read law under Calvin DeWolf beginning in 1847, gained admittance to the bar the following year, and partnered in a succession of firms over the next two decades. He settled in Evanston in 1854, where he served as the first president of the Village Board. Hurd was an abolitionist, and following the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act he became involved in the Kansas Free-Soil movement. He attended the 1856 convention in Buffalo, New York which established the National Kansas Committee, and served as secretary of its Chicago-based executive committee. In 1862, Hurd became a law lecturer at the University of Chicago. Hurd married as his first wife, Cornelia A. Hilliard, with whom he had three children.

“Hon. Harvey B. Hurd,” Transactions of the Illinois State Historical Society (1906), 338-40; U.S. Census Office, Seventh Census of the United States (1850), Ward 1, Chicago, Cook County, IL, 146; U.S. Census Office, Eighth Census of the United States (1860), Cook County, IL, 31; The Inter Ocean (Chicago, IL), 21 January 1906, 6:2-3; Gravestone, Rosehill Cemetery and Mausoleum, Chicago, IL.